Quotes About Struggle

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.

History is the judge — its executioner, the proletarian. - Speech at anniversary of the People's Paper, April 1856

Es incapaz de gobernar, porque es incapaz de garantizar a sus esclavos la existencia ni aun dentro de su esclavitud, porque se ve forzada a dejarlos llegar hasta una situación de desamparo en que no tiene más remedio que mantenerles, cuando son ellos quienes debieran mantenerla a ella.

It was now painfully clear to the people that equality before the law did not produce genuine, human equality

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of workers.

Communists] openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

toda la historia de la sociedad [...] es una historia de luchas de clases, de luchas entre clases explotadoras y explotadas, dominantes y dominadas...

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger'. Unless it's polio.

I'm useless in water. I wake up at night drowning in my own saliva.

Rhoda, my mother, was what the neighbors euphemistically termed a difficult woman. Her misery was like Texas oil: You could drill anywhere and find some.

Fall?" he repeated. "Say more like flying, as if someone threw you. What  .  .  . was that?" I chewed on my words before I let them out. "I  .  .  . sometimes have little disagreements with  .  .  . um, with reality. And physics.

She was a terrible mother, there was no doubt about it, but she didn't even have the strength to feel guilty.

I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don't you think?

Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.

How quickly life could dissolve into its more ugly elements.

Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back.

The eat part was easy. The praying and loving were harder.

The roof of the big top was dark blue, spangled with silver stars, and it reminded him of something but he couldn't think what, and then he realized it was the roof - the vault of heaven - in a side chapel at the Catholic church where his mother dragged them three times a day on Sunday when they were very small, until she ran out of energy and let the devil have them. (One Good Turn)

He had been reconciled to death during the war and then suddenly the war was over and there was a next day and a next day and a next day. Part of him never adjusted to having a future.

Now it would not be the geography of Empire that would make him, it would be the architecture of war.

she didn't see the point of alcohol, or drugs. People had little enough control over their lives without losing more.

The kid looked up from her wampum and stared inscrutably at her and then, for the first time since Tracy bought her, Courtney smiled. A beatific sunbeam of a smile. Tracy beamed back, a bubble-burst of mixed emotion – ecstasy and agony in equal, confusing measure inside her – rising in her chest. Jesus. How did parents manage with this kind of stuff on a daily basis? She found herself blinking back tears.

Sometimes you wondered why anyone bothered crawling out of the cradle when what lay ahead was so darn difficult.

The war had been a tide that had receded and now here it was lapping around her ankles again.